A collection of responses.
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The whole patriarchal system has to come down, because it is founded upon a fundamental and delusional belief in separation.
You decide. We are all walking this journey together, or, we are just playing intellectual games with ourselves, and in this case through what appears to be a very exclusive and narrow viewport.
So, for you it may be about what are actually rather simplistic “non-dual” concepts, but for me it is also about touching in together.
It truly is important to notice and acknowledge each other’s pain and difficulties.
And even though you may fear otherwise, nothing is ever lost by joining in, for there has in truth never been anything to gain or lose.
The shorter version of this being, it costs nothing to actually feel and experience each other. And yet it gains us everything.
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By his own vast public record both voiced and written he has lived inside an interwoven and interdependent collection of incredibly privileged, isolated, affluent and protected upper-class bubbles, for his whole life.
A “human” contrived system of bubbles that are totally dependent upon extreme adversarial, hierarchical and patriarchal ideologies, which to this day continue to attempt to own, define and control literally everything and everyone on earth that this loose knit and conflicted collection of ideologies does not identify with as being part of its own capricious and ever shifting narcissistic beliefs in privilege and affluence.
The only adversity he has ever actually known, first hand and directly, are merely a result of the internal contradictions that invariably come along with living and trying to keep “special” place(s) and identity(s) secure and protected within these systemically defended and competing bubbles.
Bubbles that necessarily must, in order to continue to maintain, expand and (seem to) exist, keep their inhabitants in extreme ignorance of and isolation from what have now become some very vast horrors continually being perpetrated upon our whole human world, as well as all of life, here on Earth.
So that the bubble walls only ever keep reflecting back to him his very own beautifully modeled “clay” projections.
With all his smarts and wisdom, studies, and exquisite refinements, he has yet to learn that we are not here to awaken or “disappear” OUT of all of existence, but rather to fully awaken into it.
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“We” do not awaken. We are merely the pathways and “footsteps” of Awakening Herself.
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We are here to (actually) live and (literally) die into this journey, not study maps and become erudite about them. Maps and erudition are merely helpful (and potentially loving) companions along the way.
Real “understanding” is a lived experience, awakening to itself. The true discovery is only, repeat only when willing, conscious (NOT willful) surrender is fully engaged. With “full engagement” being in the end the gift of Grace and Love.
The only real journey (odyssey?) is this One we share. There is neither beginning nor end, and no one who is ahead or behind. Only foolishness thinks otherwise.
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This whole exchange, question and replies altogether, is an illusion trying to convince itself, through these additional illusory appearances of a seeming multiplicity of “separate” identities (aka egos), using various bits and pieces of disparate “non-dual” ideologies that are themselves mostly just more of the same, that all of its seeming multiplicity of “separate parts,” or participants, is real.
Not much different than moving checkers around on a two-dimensional game board, in order for the “pieces” to convince themselves, and therefore each seeming “other,” not to mention the whole shooting match (i.e. game, board, positions and pieces), that “they” all have distinct separate “non-dual” existences.
This can, does, and will go on “forever,” here in these illusions of time, as it has gone on for countless centuries and even millennia in some of the various regions and concentrations of our collective and for the most part human imagined world, under a multitude of “spiritual” guises.
The questioner clearly likes to pretend, and of course pretend to itself first and foremost, that it is the “game” board, and that by dint of its very incorrigible persistence in making up these games, is holding all the positions in play. All the while as the pieces coming into and out of its play like to pretend they are getting “somewhere” simply through contributing their own various and separate bits and pieces, aka moves and “positions.”
All of it together functioning merely to continue another “modern” digital version of an ancient illusory spiritual game that has always been inseparable from a much larger and more ancient human meta illusion of separation, that has taken over our whole planet now.
An illusion so deeply lost that we are now destroying our very whole planet, this place of Creation we have all arisen through and come into some minimal levels of collective as well as individual self-awareness. Not to mention all of the rest of life here on Earth that we are in truth inseparable from.
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The World (Rome) is burning, and Bernardo continues to fiddle alongside all the other head-in-sand, greedy, power-addicted personages in the Courts of Nero, instead of looking out and around and speaking (and acting!) accordingly FROM where he only ever continues to incessantly and in ever more contrived ways talk ABOUT.
And if he is not “there,” so to speak, as he has sometimes openly said, then shut up and get there, and THEN speak, from there and as there, through all the same advantages he now has to speak, as well as act, in these ways.
THAT is what literally our whole world needs now, more than ever. Emphasize more than ever.
If you cannot see any of this you are to some significant degree still caught in the very same courts of Nero and looking inward onto the charades, as you dance merrily away.
Bernardo has much more of a platform to effect some real, repeat real differences, aka break down some of those court walls, than either you or I do. Even as I and you do also try. And of course, he has to take some risks to do so. But it is exactly his world that will also be destroyed as well, eventually, if he doesn’t.
And the world is burning (metaphor, metaphor, fire is only part of it) exactly as an outcome of the continual expansion, maintenance and erection of all those courts of Nero, with the courts of Nero being a very serious metaphor I am using to point to some VERY large and multiple false realities od separation, NOW.
Because, the world is actually burning NOW. Ask any Palestinian HOW that is. And one day it will also be in your backyard, whether you believe it or not. UNLESS some very real radical things can begin to happen right NOW.
I have written to Bernardo in the past a couple times, and in the past, he let what I wrote stand in his venues. But no more, because the empire is clearly absorbing him. If you go to my Substack site, and call up a full list of the pieces there, you will be able to find what I have written to him in the past.
I am studiously avoiding the extremely patronizing tone in your presumptuous words. It is the WORLD that is in “need” and “not receiving,” and not your ideas and projections of what are almost certainly about your own personal realms.
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You are confusing neural pathways, myriad chemical activities along those pathways, brain functions, thinking, or whatever terms you wish to apply here, with consciousness.
Which merely indicates that Consciousness, as it is presently expressing through “your” temporary organism, or organizational existence, is still (and rather defensively it seems) lost in some deep identification with those activities, and this particular form or organism through which they are being supported, nourished and enabled, and some certain vague recordings or conditioning that a lot of those activities have variously, though still temporarily, impressed upon the whole shooting match you call you.
Otherwise known as “your” beliefs. More typically described as ego, beliefs in illusions of separation, mind-body identity, etc. With “mind” in this case being merely a few semi-conscious experiences of all that chemical activity, that you obviously still “think,” or believe, is “you.”
I know I Am, prior to all of that sort of foolishness. Direct, here and now experience. That you do not know this for yourself does not prove that I do not know so for myself. And here’s the thing. I have no need to prove it to you.
And yet, ALL you know IS your experience, whether it be of your thoughts (beliefs, memories), feelings or sensations. Just that, no more. I dare you to go look for the experiencer. YOU! Just that, no more. And not in science, but right HERE in the experience itself. And then KEEP looking, past your fear.
Or you can stay lost in all that foolishness for as long as you wish. It is EXACTLY your choice, a choice which comes along with Consciousness being always and forever prior to all of this foolishness humans keep setting loose upon the world.
In other words, to reenable this same choice we all have, as soon as we become aware enough, in this case in what is currently expressing itself as a rather strong belief in a “separate,” “independent” and temporary “you,” you have to realize you are already making that choice.
For anyone interested in some in-depth and very deep science centered ways of understanding that first is Consciousness and then all else, you can google Bernardo Kastrup. or if you’d like a more profound and “traditional” non-dual “spiritual” perspective on the same, google Rupert Spira. Or both, for they complement each other.
Or you can hang with this fellow’s rather vehemently defended ideas. Sorta like in some ancient times all those people hanging forever onto flat-earth and earth-centered-universe ideas. Though back then it was somewhat prudent, otherwise you might get killed. Fortunately such is not the case at the moment.
Instead these days it is all these very same “brain centered,” mind-body ego identities of separation who are sooo “logically,” with ALL their logic based upon that one primary meta-belief in the illusion of separation, destroying our whole earth now, in a zillion ways.
Which is a different conversation.
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As long as you need “proof” you will never know. The whole point is to turn around, or we could say right-side up, and start with the mystery, not-knowing. And yet, how amazing, you exist.
And so will begin a discovery of this amazement, which by its very nature is prior to all proof. A different kind of knowing, with “thinking” not necessary.
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This is still all “you” describing experiences “in the past,” “thinking” them out, and making up new ways of describing them. All of which were, going by your descriptions, merely various temporary states. In none of it am I hearing anyone who has gone past any of that, and actually, seriously, and with full commitment looked for the “experiencer.”
In some traditions in the East all this that you “demonstrate” here is called Siddhis. Lots of pyrotechnics, with none of it being about awakening. Once you (or anyone) really goes looking for the experiencer all that will cease to matter. That it does still matter to you as much as it appears to is therefore a BIG tell.
Let’s say we are exploring here the ways Ramana Maharshi and Nisargadatta speak, about awakening, consciousness, enlightenment, all these various terms for what cannot be named or described and only is known by itself. Or how about the folks this group is named after, mystics Meister Eckhart, Thomas Merton, Carl Jung, Rumi, Lao Tzu, etc.? So we can leave me out of it?
Because all those folks are the ones you are also arguing with as well. In other words I am not pointing to or saying anything new.
Not that I’m out of it of course, but rather, to see if you might quit trying to butt “heads” here with me?
Which is in fact how you entered this thread, basically attempting to destroy the original post. That is until I passed by, and for whatever or no reason felt an inclination to intervene. Though not for you, God forbid, but rather for anyone else passing by. In case it is helpful to even one or two folks.
What you describe is something many people doing psychedelics could also easily and in fact have described in similar and/or in even some of the very same words. All of it merely Siddhis, powers, beside the point at best, traps at worse.
Read the story of Milarepa, anyone, for a deep description of where I am pointing now.
‘I AM’ is totally without any of that foolishness. Simply, I AM. Without any other, any experience, any state. Nothing to come, nothing to go.
Knowing knows itself. As said, no proof necessary nor can I even imagine offering it, for such simply does not exist.
Instead all you demonstrate is a mind not at peace, wanting to “prove” that all its pyrotechnics, Siddhis, or whatever, somehow matter. And clearly it does all “matter” (for awhile) to you.
But what we reach for here, or at least what the people this group is named after were reaching for, is prior to ALL matter.
You are like the classical teacup in Buddhist stories, so full that nothing new can ever be added. And I have zero interest in butting heads.
I write in these ways for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, in the way Jesus is said to have used those expressions, with him very much NOT referring to bodily senses.
Because You mention Carl Jung, I’ll quote him in closing.
“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
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I will offer that the only “playground of delusion” here is a mind obviously “convinced” that its own rather vehemently defended limitations are the full extent of reality.
So I will suggest, again, that, just in case cracks in those convictions ever occur enough to allow in some new perspectives, you read, listen and study the many writings, podcasts, videos and teachings of both Bernardo Kastrup and Rupert Spira.
Beyond that I leave you to your own devices and self-imposed limitations.
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“...it would prove all modern science incorrect...”
Actually no, most of modern science would (and does) continue to correctly (or at least functionally) describe the behavior of (if I may say it this way) “consciousness,” rather than “matter.”
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In the same ‘spirit’ (if I may) of your musing, and what is, maaaaybe, an invitation?
It is only a collection of temporary body-mind conditioned beliefs, caught up in an identity (label, ideology) of separation “from” what is both the substance and source of everything, that ever comes up with any “need” of a “separate” God.
Many intact and environmentally integrated indigenous cultures, significantly undisturbed by the warring behaviors of separation identities, knew to some degree, with this knowing embedded in their cultures, shared perceptions and lineages, that this seeming experience of individuation into a multiplicity of unique expressions is a temporary “state” (many terms) and not the whole of who they (we) were (are). Along with a huge lot of amazingly varied and different ways, as cultures and cultural stories, to celebrate as well as deepen this awareness, or knowing, of the unity of all seeming things.
Temporary Gods in a sense, for temporary celebrations, and also for gratefulness, ways to imagine and touch in with each other through love and care, and all the many other ways life has become more and more self-aware and refined through humans, right here in life’s unique what I’ll call for brevity “Earth journey,” all the while as this same life or consciousness reaches to awakening to itself more and more through more humans.
And actually realize this huge experience and appreciation of what is all of us together. Every aspect unique, nothing separate. Consciousness, Life, Love, God, Truth, Being, soooo many ways to point back to what we also are, cannot ever name or define, and only be, because we are never not.
Actually be this knowing that knows itself, prior to all these temporary labels and identities, celebrations, languages, proofs and processes, in other words.
Other cultures, uprooted by war, extreme patriarchal behaviors, fear, famine and disease, especially, we could say, some cultures beginning in what is now called Europe, have instead taken this temporary experience and its collection of beliefs in seeming separation and turned it, their very ideas and beliefs of themselves as separate beings, into their God. Made what they believe is who “they” are into their God, in other words. And the projecting all that onto a plethora of idols and images. And so have become the “makers” of themselves, now “separate” from all “else.”
Resulting in institutionalized religions, aristocracies, “science” as a means of power, mediums of exchange as a means of accumulation, political power, classes, capitalism, oligarchies, nation states, and all the way up to a whole planet that is right now on the very most stark edges of total destruction.
All because of this belief in separation, that something could be separate from what is everything. A simple biological instinct to survive and reproduce being combined with a collection of temporary body-mind conditioned beliefs that are altogether lost in identifications with their very own illusions of separation.
If we do not soon learn, as a whole planet wide human species now, that we are NOT separate, the earth as we know it is done for. We humans are not separate from that demise, and all the “science” and hobbies of billionaires, oligarchies and elites, who believe they can for a little while longer transcend or avoid the earth’s demise as we know it, is only bringing it about even more quickly.
And that is a whole other conversation entirely.
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You co-opt, take out of context and misinterpret Jung’s words in some rather extreme ways, all for your own fantastical and ideological purposes, weaving some rather limited and selectively excerpted misunderstandings of Jung’s actual and rather extensive and broad ranging writings into merely more and more made-up fantastical stories of what you alone see, through and as your own projections.
All in order to support what is clearly a huge foundational investment in some rather extensive beliefs in separation, and the imagined and delusional power and autonomy these beliefs of yours are causing you to think is actually you.
NONE of your words here nor anywhere throughout this whole thread indicate any real experience whatsoever of anything more, or other, than your own made-up ideas. With some rather limited and faulty understandings of leading-edge frontline contemporary science thrown in, for a few special effects.
And yet even much more than that, there is literally zero indication of any serious openness or curiosity for anything beyond your own fantasies and made up stories. I and another here have pointed you in some alternative and different directions, where you might possibly discover perspectives beyond your own convictions. And yet you refuse to look.
It is as if, when someone actually gains your attention for a little while, and tries point beyond your castle walls for you, to what I’ll call for brief the lights and sounds of a greater world outside them, a world of spaciousness not separate nor other than the very same space inside your extremely hardened boundaries, you instead simply raise your made up ideological walls higher and thicker, bound and determined to assert beyond all else that these increasingly higher and thicker and ever hardening walls and what they only seem to contain are who and what you are.
No person nor God nor any calling from anyone or anywhere, that you do not ALSO feel deep down there somewhere at the center of your very own terribly walled in heart of hearts, can change that. Only YOU can. And even then, only when something actual and real moves within you, something much deeper than all your thinking, something that truly wants to dissolve way these walls you keep believing is who and what you are.
I was never writing for you, in any of this, in any case, and now I am done with it. it is that something IN you that I have been writing for, a something that is in all of us, waiting to be woken up, all in each person’s own time and ways.
Eyes that see and ears that hear, PRIOR to all this form and foolishness.
I have neither walls nor head to butt against these beliefs and convictions of yours. I keep trying to go around them, but you keep raising more walls everywhere I try.
Once again and this time for certain, I leave you to your own devices. That tiny little kingdom you keep believing is you.
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Fundamentalist Christianity, MAGA Republicans as well as Corporations and Capitalism all have nearly identical overlapping ways of excusing the exact same selfish behavior, though much less round-about as you are attempting here.
They simply say that God punishes the wicked (or inferiority), so if you are poor you must be wicked (or inferior), and if you are rich you must be good (or superior).
Totally ignoring Jesus’s words comparing a camel and a rich man, neither of which can pass through the eye of a needle nor the gates of heaven.
And in multiple sutras the Buddha teaches that the greatest wealth is simply contentment. That is all.
If you still retain that much wealth as you seem to be attempting to defend, in our current world, with all its poverty and so many other extreme interactive and overlapping issues, then all that stuff, money, wealth is also still very much there, very deeply stuck, in your very own made up mind. With this very attempt to excuse its accumulation as its own clear evidence.
All such tiny little kingdoms as you seem to be attempting to justify, like ALL palaces and kingdoms, survive off the enforced poverty, death, misery and labor of others past and present.
Yet, like all tiny little kingdoms in the beliefs of separation and matter-first ideologies, they do eventually dissipate.
That dissipation is always its own teaching, or lessons, in its own time.
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They are, this Rage and Hope you bring to our nascent conversation, the fuels and energies of every action of progressive change, in every stagnant and ingrown time there ever has been, in all of human history.
And as well, real actions that bring true healthy evolutionary (and revolutionary) change always come from the bottom up, in circular ways. .
They never ever have, and they never ever will, come from the top down, in all these current hierarchical, imperialist, patriarchal and linearly insane non-ways that keep trying to play out as real, in all their made-up temporary realms of greed, power addictions and grandiose self-imagery.
All of existence from the macro to the micro is fundamentally circular. And not even flatland circular, globally circular, and beyond. It is only insane illusions, like the ones that are destroying our planet Earth now, that are linear and separation ideology based.
It is all coming down, all around the planet, and hugely so, without any of our imaginations presently able to comprehend or describe how that will ultimately be. It cannot go on in these ways. Literally. Yet it refuses to give up and cannot believe in its own demise, just like every cancer that has ever metastasized. You cannot “fix” death.
People working in upper levels ways can only ever try, if they are awake and smart enough, to nudge things so at least some parts of it might fall with less destruction, and thereby be more helpful to what comes next.
Including being helpful to all of us here at the grass roots who are all about, repeat all about, whether we realize this yet or not (many of us do), what is to grow back up through the rubble, leaving all this insane patriarchal, hierarchical and imperialist past, based on extreme illusions of separation, finally and fully behind.
No matter how many generations that may need to take.
We must become seeds now, so what really matters will survive the fires and droughts and floods, seeds that will naturally thrive and be quickened through all of that, so that when the times are right and no matter how far from now that may seem to be, we can bloom again, into a whole new and different world. A world that no longer believes in all these insanely destructive illusions of separation. Seeds that will also remember, but only for a moment, what was not ever real, only illusions gone insane.
Just like all deserts and forests and mountains do, everywhere. Fires come and fires go, water and drought. Life remains, and this Consciousness that was never born never dies.
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You are looking into a mirror. And as long as I keep responding to you in an effort to go past your beliefs, and not meet you head on, you will believe it is me and not your own image. It is the nature of these sorts of exchanges, with someone as attached to their ideas and beliefs as you clearly are.
What I have learned once again and ever more, and even at my age which is a generation or more past you, with literally a whole life spent in these ways, is no matter how much I may want to try to reach someone behind their beliefs and ideologies, whether it be by trying to go around, under, over, upside down or inside out, whatever, it does no good whenever they don’t first reveal an interest.
I don’t discredit my urge though. Quite often it has been more than a little helpful for people. And this is of course primarily why I engaged you, in other words for others.
And, where it is not helpful so be it. You will suffer your life and beliefs as you will. For it is your choice always.
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There you go once again, you refuse believe anything but your own thoughts, conditioning, ideology and projections.
Quoting others to such an extent clearly shows that you rely on memory, references and some highly constructed facades, made of misunderstood and taken out of context materials from other people’s descriptions and thoughts about ACTUAL experience. You are like an appearing and disappearing “book” arguing that, because it can make up and tell stories of other people’s stories, it is somehow real, alive.
I have yet to hear you speak from ANY direct experience of what EVERY one of these people’s life activities were totally about, that you keep quoting.
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There is only one choice; to surrender this belief we are separate egos.
That we are still seeming to exist as separate egos represents the same choice already made and in action, unconsciously, continuously, all over our one whole planet, over and over and over.
It is this choice, incredibly widespread and now extremely destructive to our commons, and all of life on earth, that is the foundation for ALL resistance to what is. It is also literally the only delusional belief all humans will (still) seem to agree on.
Yet the choice remains. We made a mistake, that belief is not true, and mistakes can be corrected. We chose an illusion; separation is not real. Yet in this case of ego, countless generations of practice, avoidance and conditioning must be overcome in order for humans to begin to choose differently.
Herein is the essence of true spiritual practice. With the clear understanding that merely more practice does not and cannot “undo” practice. Just like more thinking will not and cannot undo thinking.
And therefore the “non-dual” approach, to “do” what we cannot do, all the while as we know that all doing is of the ego.
And so to take this further, “desire,” in these ways you are framing it here, is just and merely more conditioning. Perhaps to some degree more recent than “generations,” but never the less the same.
Free will, to borrow your phrase and even as I would say it differently, is to fully become what you are calling here the “universal field of subjectivity.”
The non-dual “spiritual” [non]journey, or passage through the gateless gate, to borrow from Zen.
To quote Richard Rohr, “God loves us by becoming us.” The gate, journeyer, and passage are meant to disappear. Like clouds dissolving into a clear vast sky. A sky we also are.
And in all this there never has been what you call “necessity.” it was always complete full Freedom, or free will as you like to say. The problem with “will,” in these ways you keep using that term, is it is never free. It is always willful.
And so now consider the difference between willfulness and willingness. Herein is a potential narrow gate through which one might pass, into what for fun I’ll call non-realms.
That is, to become totally, completely and fully willing to surrender literally everything, including all one’s ideas of time, to simply what is.
In other words, while there is still these beliefs in will, it must become willingness, not willfulness.
All of this essay of yours, Bernardo, appears to be merely an argument by a particular and rather skillful, practiced and highly trained ego, unique and beautiful in its own ways, for the mere continuation of its own journeys through its own somewhat exclusive beliefs in separation.
Many years ago, I was present when a respected physicist from Berkeley, after a little bit of back and forth, asked Rupert Spira’s teacher, Francis Lucille; “well then what is the purpose of the mind?”
Francis answered; “the purpose of the mind is to take you to where you are ready to leave the mind behind...”
You can stand near this “edge” you keep making up with all these words, Bernardo, and continue to “shorten” your distance to it, literally forever. With “forever” understood to be merely more “time” than you are able to imagine.
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A better question, I believe, might be to begin to ask yourself “why is it that I am not ready?” And then keep asking, all the while setting aside every answer, until the questioner himself has dissolved away.
On the other side of that gateless gate, you may discover an opportunity to look back and simply notice, briefly, there was never any gate, and that nothing has happened.
If you think that I am denying free will Bernardo you are not paying attention, just jumping to conclusions. I am saying neither that we have free will, nor that we don’t have it; what I am saying is that the question has no meaning, literally.
I am instead calling the conversations that keep orbiting around the gravity your writings into some larger and deeper terrains or dimensions, and especially in regards to that absence. So to speak.
I have heard Rupert Spira say, while in his presence, that you are his friend. So I believe you know where I am pointing. And yet all you ever want to do is look and make up beautiful stories about what you see. You refuse to go.
ALL of this is about an undoing, not a doing.
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Altogether this is just more mere contrivance and artifice attempting to validate a partial and ever shifting experience of its “own” ephemeral (therefore fearful) “self,” as another (other) “exalted” (less ephemeral) delusional identity of separation.
And “it” is doing so in EXACTLY the same way Bernardo has been in his own professional career, that is by presenting its contrivances and artifices as valid and challenging counterpoints to what it considers to be a certain special other someone’s (and/or culture’s) contrivances and artifices.
This “it” is compelled, as sooo many are, by its own ephemeral (fearful) conditioning, to somehow exceed and/or defeat, aka become somehow “less” ephemeral than what it is imagining is an also contrived and artificial “other,” and, by doing so, “somehow” make itself seem more “real” within its very “own” believed “separate” existence.
Whether it is the imaginings of separation ideologies, the beliefs of capital, or the fantasies of power-over, it is, all of it, the very same compelling reactions of one same fundamental fear that (in truth) one does not really exist, as something separate, other, and special.
No matter what languages and labels “it” uses, every bit is based on beliefs that existence, the universe, life, or however one attempts to relate here in the mere scheme of “things,” is a zero-sum, win-lose, life and death game.
With all of this occurring within an extremely relative and wholly imagined inner world that is contrived out of arbitrary values seemingly equal, superior or lesser to whatever it believes is somehow challenging its own extremely attached to “and therefore even more special” identity.
And of course, with ALL such identities still as always lost in delusions of separation. AKA ego.
And also of course with all of this occurring as well as reacting to itself (for who “else” is there really?) WITHIN a temporary and collectively imagined human planetary “world” of separate interwoven “boxes” hugely lost in its now vast delusions of separation from what is, to describe the indescribable most simplistically, simultaneously everything and the source of everything.
And all the while as this temporary human collective’s own extreme patriarchal hubris is now in the late stages of destroying the gift (grace) of its very own self-aware existence, on a literal, total and actual planetary scale.
Taking most of the rest of life as it presently experiences itself here on Earth along with it.
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For those of you having trouble here, consider that what Bernardo proposes and attempts to teach is far above and immeasurably beyond all the patriarchal and hierarchical based “science” a lot of folks in this group keep trying, with all of patriarchy’s eternal foolishness, to box it back into.
All so a few more temporary “identities” of separation can stay lost in their delusional beliefs that some sort of illusory control can be gained OVER a “something” that has been calling out, pointing back to, and describing itself, as always and already what we are, since the beginnings of time and so-called history (his story). ALREADY each seeming one of us, as well as all of us, and all of life.
All together reaching out to us through a whole huge bunch of come and gone (and some of it still present) human civilizations and cultures, and what those cultures have sometimes called, rather simplistically, “mysticism” and/or “spirituality.”
Factual, outward, evident, and recorded, all around the planet, for literally multiple thousands of years now.
Bernardo knows this, or he wouldn’t keep having conversations with Rupert Spira, who knows all this in spades.
A re-quote:
“ “mystical experience, like any other experience, is grounded in and must relate to the social environment in which it is achieved. It thus invariable bears the stamp of the culture and society in which it arises.”
I would add that it also bears the stamp of the individual and bodily ecosystem it chooses as its mouthpiece.
Or, in other words, what is not consciously, repeat consciously, grounded in a person’s actual every day existence, from whichever perspective such a one may have, across this whole wide spectrum some of us call local to global, will always be, in every unconscious one’s imagined end of what never was, hubris.
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This is one of the clearest examples of intellectual masturbation as I have ever come across.
Yes, life knows itself. Knows its own nature. And, what is important to understand is that this knowing is the very actual activity of life itself, altogether inseparable from its knowing.. This activity-that-is-life-knowing-itself is without any need of an identity in the beliefs of separation to make its knowing, aka living existence, prior to all these words, SO.
Awareness needs no other to know itself, in other words. All puns intended.
Altogether just one more example of people caught in their heads trying with all their relative intellectual “might” to capture what cannot ever be captured, but only lived. Making up instead just ever more dualistic jargon.
The more fully we actually live, the more fully we actually know we also are this same life, knowing itself in truth now through us. The fullness of our living becoming the truth we also are. The Spiral of Creation.
Only then will one begin to understand what living actually is, the healthy living that our planet was once all about, in a returning of ourselves back to our very own source, a spiral that we are in truth inseparable from, before certain humans came along and decided they could believe themselves “separate,” “act out” this belief, and therefore become “in charge” of all of life. In a sense driving a straight line through the spiral heart of existence, in their own temporary minds and beliefs.
There becomes a huge discussion that unfolds from here, but only by following the example of Eris, the Greek Goddess who broke into the back of the great hall where all the Male Gods were in fervent discussion and debate, and rolled her head down the hall’s central aisle, for all the Gods to see.
Just one story, obscure, told in some anarchist circles. with the point being, for those Gods, get out of your bloody fucking heads.
A call actually that is just as unpopular in these modern scholarly circles as Eris was unpopular in the Greek mythologies.
Life, aka planet Earth, will have its way in the end of time, with time being the primary illusion that enables all our additional beliefs in these fantasies of separation.
~ John Fridinger
Late Fall, 2025
Talent, OR
